For nearly three weeks, boxing has been in a familiar fight for its soul and its legitimacy, as critics and fans alike have struggled to cope with the reality of Nick Blackwell being carried from a Wembley ring on a stretcher. Inevitably, financial pragmatism dictates that, across town at the O2 Arena in Greenwich on Saturday night, the debate about the sport’s worth continues, but from an altogether different perspective.
Anthony Joshua and Charles Martin, unbeaten heavyweights with enough combined power to kickstart a small jet, are engaged in a pay-per-view contest on Sky that has been trailed relentlessly as a world title fight almost certain to end in a painful stoppage for the loser. For all the heartfelt concern about Blackwell – who looks to be recovering well after coming out of an induced coma last Saturday – the show goes on.
And, in keeping with tradition, Joshua, who will have the majority of the 20,000 spectators baying for him, predicts it will be over by the sixth round. Martin, fighting outside the United States for the first time, is similarly bellicose. It will not be an evening for the squeamish.
While pain is the chief selling point of the event – any professional fight, for that matter – it has also been marketed as deciding who is the heavyweight champion of the world. But, the excellence of Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko for more than a decade notwithstanding, there has not been a single properly unified title-holder since Lennox Lewis 16 years ago. Currently, the sport has four world heavyweight champions, a notion that is absurd to traditionalists and the uninterested. Integrity is as dust again.
Pain is the chief selling point of the event – any professional fight, for that matter
At stake here, then, is just the quarter of the world title that Martin has owned since it was handed to him when the IBF stripped Tyson Fury for reasons too obtuse to elaborate on after his victory in Germany over Wladimir Klitschko last November.
With consummate one-upmanship, Fury’s uncle and trainer, Peter, announced a couple of hours before the Joshua-Martin weigh-in on Friday that his fighter, still owner of the WBO and (barely relevant) IBO titles, as well as the WBA’s “super” belt, has agreed terms with Klitschko for a rematch in Manchester on 9 July.
Then, in a twist as delicious as it was predictable, he said that, should Joshua beat Martin, he could meet Fury later this year in an all-British extravaganza to unify their respective strands of the title.
“If Tyson comes through his obligation and Joshua comes through Martin on Saturday night, there is no reason why we can’t get that fight on next,” Peter Fury said. “We definitely want it by the end of the year. Tyson is not wanting to sit down. We don’t want to wait for long, we want to keep moving forward, keep the momentum going.”
It is a brave, perhaps daft, piece of scheduling: that is the weekend of the Euro 2016 final, the Wimbledon final and the British Grand Prix. But boxing seems incapable of functioning to maximum effect without regularly abandoning common sense. There was another outbreak of what looked like stage-managed anarchy at the weigh-in when David Haye, coming back in pursuit of the WBA title he once held, had contretemps in the crowd with another former world champion, the shopworn but loud American Shannon Briggs. – Agencies
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